The Rude Pundit

2/21/2018

One of the things I learned firsthand over the last few days of gun “rights” proponents attacking me for advocating a ban on certain weapons is genuinely distressing. It’s not that a lot of people own a lot of guns, although that’s disturbing enough. No, it’s that I believe, sincerely and with no malice, there is a widespread mass hysteria, if not outright mental illness, connected to a certain paranoid strain of gun owner.

Before someone says something like “Crazy liberal says every gun owner is crazy,” let me state as clearly as possible: I’m not saying every gun owner is crazy. If I meant that, I’d say it. You can be a gun owner and be perfectly sane. For instance, a good many gun owners believe the NRA is full of shit. A good many gun owners support things like a ban on semi-automatic rifles and handguns because, let’s face it, the chance of you being a situation where you need to be able to keep shooting is pretty goddamn small.

But then there are gun owners who believe they need to stockpile weapons because they might need to go to war with the American government if it becomes a "tyranny" (which seems to mean "not as white and male"). Those people have gone mad with paranoia. And I'm not talking your typical kind of Fox "news" paranoia. I'm talking Alex Jones-levels of hysteria.

How so? By all accounts, we are living through an extended period of record low crime throughout much of the country. There is virtually no chance a foreign invader could send an army here to take over even part of the United States. And, despite all the hype, the number of terrorist incidents post-9/11 have been as small in number and number of deaths as terrorism pre-9/11. Indeed, the people who stockpile guns to await an Armageddon (Islamic or Christian or Communist or whatever) are more likely to commit acts of terrorism than any foreigner here. But, like crime rates, the number of terrorist incidents was higher in the 1970s than now.

These are facts. They are not opinions. They are borne out by study and statistics and history. Yet, in defiance of those facts, gun hoarders believe that it’s inevitable that they will need to defend the Constitution (well, the 2nd Amendment) against the United States military or some secret black-ops force or something. It's nonsensical, but it's the logic of the paranoid.

If you are given facts yet you refuse to acknowledge those facts are real, that’s delusional. If a horse is standing in front of me and people tell me that a horse is standing right in front of me, what would those people say if, knowing I had perfectly fine eyesight, I simply denied the existence of the horse. They’d wonder what the hell was wrong with me, as well they should. And no one should let me have a goddamn horse.

The good Russ Belville asked an interesting question over on the Rude Pundit Patreon page. He wondered if the gun hoarders who keep saying that we need to take care of the mentally ill would be willing for police to confiscate the guns of someone who is deemed legally insane or a potential danger to themselves or others. It’s a simple question that’s a put-up or shut-up kind of thing.

But maybe I'm being too harsh. In his New York Times "column" (if by "column," you mean "a desperate stroll through a barren wasteland and pretending that it's still a verdant meadow") yesterday, David Brooks argues that the left needs to respect the rights of gun owners more, even the most extremist ones. They see the desire to have a few more regulations, like background checks, maybe even a license and insurance, but most especially banning of any currently legal firearms as an attack on their “culture.” That ain’t a good enough excuse.

Motherfucker, cultures change all the time. Polygamy used to be part of Mormon culture. Then it turned out that polygamy was being used as an excuse to assault children. So it was outlawed in the place where it had been a big-ass part of the culture. People adapted and changed. And a whole lot of girls didn’t get raped by grown men. (Am I comparing 2nd Amendment absolutism to polygamy? Sure. Why not?)

Brooks talks about how the "Reds" (in this case, not the Commies, but people who believe in conservative ideology) hate being "shamed" by the "Blues" when they are brought together for a conversation: "The Reds feel shamed by the Blues to a much greater degree than the Blues realize. Reds are very reluctant to enter into a conversation with Blues, for fear of further shaming." And, truly, shame has been used to silence people. But if your perspective on school shootings is that dead children and fear in the classroom are just the price one pays for the "freedom" of mass gun ownership, well, you can kind of go fuck yourself and feel ashamed. People like Brooks who want the left to "reason" with the delusional and the factually wrong are exacerbating the damage done by the paranoiacs.

Indeed, the only response to people who think this way, who are trying to discredit the activated students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the only thing that should be said to people who believe the lies being told about the kids who are now advocating for gun control should be that they are sick and they need help. Those liars shouldn't be given a platform. They shouldn't be put on a panel with people who are basing their arguments on facts. They should be told to listen to the kids, goddamnit. They are the Active Shooter Drill Generation. They've been dealing with this shit for their entire lives. They have a fuck of a lot more credibility than someone snarling about jackboots and chem trails.

Essentially, we have a large, sick segment of the population that is divorced from reality and heavily-armed. They are being exploited by craven politicians, the greedy gun lobby, and the conflict-hungry media, which makes them think that their delusional thinking has merit instead of being a symptom of damage done to them and to the public in general.

And, frankly, until we start treating them that way, as sick, which, may, yeah, make them feel a bit ashamed, nothing will fundamentally change, and this corrosion of our American soul around the bloody bullet holes will rot us away.

2/20/2018

Yeah, a bit late with the posting, but I was in the UK all last week, just got back, exhausted, and, man, what a fucking mess this country is when you see it from afar.

What struck me is just how truly insane we seem right now. I'll say more about this in the next couple of days, so, instead, I'll leave you with this from Ghetto Golf, an extremely popular mini-golf course/bar in Liverpool. It expresses how I think we all feel right about now.

2/16/2018

At this point, I've written so many times about guns that I don't know what else to say. None of us do. It's the same fuckin' merry-go-round of arguments that really come back to, for me, the simple question: "Well, why don't we try something?" Because, see, as of now, as of the last 15 years or so, we haven't done anything except make it easier for people to get more guns and ammo. So let's try something.

When I posted on Twitter that I thought assault weapons should be outlawed and then gathered by law enforcement through a buyback, I ended by saying that if that doesn't work, "pry them from cold, dead hands." Predictably, that led to responses like "Try it, pussy" or "So you want the government to kill people to get guns. That's why we have guns" or other gun shit. I don't want mass murder. I don't want civil war. I'm not even proposing banning all guns. But if laws change, as they sometimes do, you gotta follow them or you get arrested. When the speed limit went down on my street, I didn't say, "Fuck you, motherfuckers. I'm doing the old speed." And if you won't comply with the law peacefully, well, shit, Cletus, that's on you.

All I want at this point is to go back to the Republican assault weapons ban from 1989, which happened after a school shooting in Stockton, California, that left 5 dead. It seems like a quaint number now in the age of regular double-digit corpse counts, but it shocked the country. And George H. W. Bush signed an executive order banning certain assault weapons. Then, urged by Carter, Ford, and Reagan, in 1994, the Congress passed a crime bill with a weaker ban, but it was still there.

As far as the legality of that ban, the Supreme Court never took it up. A lower court said it was constitutional. And, just a couple of months ago, the Supreme Court let stand a U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that an assault weapons ban in Maryland was totally constitutional. By 10-4 vote, the circuit court, which is not "liberal" or "activist" by any stretch, said, "Assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not protected by the Second Amendment." And SCOTUS let it stand.

Here's what would happen if AR-15s and the like were banned: Almost everyone who owns one would turn it in for buyback cash because they are law-abiding citizens. A few would try to protest and then have their guns taken when they're peacefully arrested. A tiny number would keep them secretly. Maybe a couple of idiots would try to Ruby Ridge it. We know how that ended. And some criminals would be criminals about it. But considering that most of the guns used in mass shootings are bought legally, at the very least, maybe we'd save some children's lives.

And, honestly, I have never heard of a situation where an AR-15 was the only gun necessary to defend oneself. Sure, you can show someone a gun and they'll back down, but, shit, that'd work if you had a little revolver. When is the last time an ordinary American was in a bind where they needed a semi-automatic rifle?

2/14/2018

Since a few conservatives have decided to be art critics and look closely at the official portrait of President Barack Obama for secret sperm imagery (this is really a thing), perhaps we would do well to see how much sperm is in another portrait, that of current president Donald Trump. In 1987, Trump hired artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan to do his face and body in a totally sexy and not at all douchey golf outfit. That painting hangs at the bar at Mar-a-Lago because of course it does. Cowan did not really have a great time working for Trump, who was a dick about the way Cowan wanted to leave the painting with an unfinished section because art. So, obviously, Cowan took his revenge with sperm imagery.

Upon closer examination of the work, Trump is coated with jizz. There is jizz on his face, jizz on his clothes, jizz on his hands. There is so much jizz on Donald Trump that it's like he was in the center of a circle jerk and was gratified as fountains of jizz were spooged all over him.

Seriously, look at his dumb fucking head:

I've seen gay bukkake porn where the dude craving cum had less sperm on his face.

And the rest of the painting is a blown load of sperm imagery. The sky is a mixture of shit and sperm, obviously befitting a man of Trump's tastes. Trump's right hand is in his pocket, the better to gratify himself since being glazed with spunk sexually excites him.

And, even though we don't want to, let's check out his crotch. We must. It is in the interest of art. Or something.

The groin area already has telltale cum stains, and the fingers of his left hand have clearly wiped jizz off them on the pants, perhaps demonstrating how Trump satisfies all his many creditors. Sean Hannity must be in a sweaty tizzy over this painting that Trump proudly displays so all can see what a cum whore he is.

Indeed, one way to see this portrait of the young(er) president is as a portrait in sperm, perhaps better titled "Donald Trump Can Go Fuck Himself."

2/13/2018

Our braying fart of president, Donald Trump, trumpeted his skills at rebuilding infrastructure yesterday at an event announcing some bullshit plan. And he used as an example his company's work on the Wollman Rink in Central Park thirty years ago. It's an ice-skating rink, not, you know, a bridge, but he's a proud motherfucker about that play area: "When I did the Wollman Rink, it was 7 years, they couldn’t get it built. It would have been forever. They couldn’t get it built. And I did it in a few months at a much smaller price. They had invested $12 million in building an ice skating rink in the middle of Central Park. Somebody told me about this the other day; they’ve never forgotten it. It was a big deal at the time. It remains a big deal...And I got involved. And I did it in a few months, and we did it for a tiny fraction — tiny fraction of the cost." And because he's gotta be dickish and wrong, he added, "And it’s really no different with a roadway. It’s no different with a bridge or tunnel, or any of the things that we’ll be fixing."

Yeah, Wollman Rink is nice. Yeah, it was a clusterfuck of failure until the end there. But it's a little more complicated, of course, and, of course, Trump exaggerated shit.

For six years (not seven), New York City tried and failed to install steel pipes with freon in the base of the rink to keep it icy. That, combined with, yes, some fucked up rules regarding contracts, was the mistake. By the time they decided to scrap that and move to brine in plastic pipes, they had burned through $12 million. But then once the city finally bailed on freon in 1986, it said that the cost would be $2-3 million to finish the job. Trump came in and said, "Gimme the $3 mill and I'll do it." So the "fraction" of the cost was not something Trump decided on. He was merely the developer. He did get it done quickly and under the $3 million budget, but he didn't spend a nickel.

And, again, it was no miracle it came in under $3 million. That was dead in the middle of the projections of what it would cost.

And, let's be clear, the entire project was paid for by New York City. It wasn't "public/private" funding, as Trump wants his infrastructure spending to be. It was public funding.

And Mr. America First hired a Canadian company to come in and build the rink.

And while the rink was being built, Trump held regular news conferences to brag about how great he was to rebuild the rink, including one where three guys just swept behind him in order to show work being done. He held a press conference to announce the ice was down and, five days later, the ice was ready. He bragged that the railed was the "same railing Onassis had on his boat." It was a fucking embarrassing circus.

And when Trump lost a bid in 1995 to continue running the rink, which turned a profit pretty quickly, he was, of course, a dick about it, saying, "The last thing I need is to be running a skating rink."

To be fair, when the rink opened, Trump was asked if he was going to skate, and he did say something pretty funny and prescient: "No thanks. There are too many people who would like to see me fall on my rear end."

2/08/2018

I was really not in the mood to write one more goddamn post about something that Donald Trump face-farted out, but then I made the mistake of looking at his remarks at the Annual National Prayer Breakfast (motto: "You Know We Just Mean Christian Prayers") and saw a few things that were odd, sketchy, and fucked-up. In short order:

1. Talking about gun victim and garbage human Steve Scalise, Trump said, "Your presence reminds us of Jesus’s words in the Book of Matthew: 'With God all things are possible.'" Yeah, that's from Matthew 19. Just three verses earlier, Jesus was a little more circumspect about what is possible: "Then Jesus said to His disciples, 'Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.'" Or maybe the gathered bloated rich fucks should have heeded Jesus just two verses before that, when he tells a rich fuck, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor." Yeah, Jesus would have kicked Trump right in his giant ass and said, "Turn your other cheek so I can kick the shit out of that one, too."

2. "[T]he words 'Praise be to God' are etched atop the Washington Monument." This is a minor thing, but the words "Laus Deo" are on the top of the monument. They translate to what Trump said, but, still, that ain't what's "etched."

3. "We see the Lord’s grace in the moms and dads who work two and three jobs to give their children the chance for a better and much more prosperous and happier life." Yeah, Trump actually praised God for the crushing, soul-tearing poverty that forces parents to work 80 hours a week, giving them no time to spend with their kids. That is some fucked-up shit right there. Trump is essentially washing his hands of the poor and saying, "Yep, God did this, not a cruel capitalistic system that exploits workers and a savage conservative government that won't provide relief."

4. The most blatant lie was "America stands with all people suffering oppression and religious persecution." Not only are we turning away refugees of oppression, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is actively seeking to deport the persecuted, even those persecuted for being Christian, and send them back to the countries that will harm them for their beliefs, all because they didn't fill out the right fucking forms at the right fucking time, or because some artificial deadline passed and they're no longer protected by an American government that couldn't give a fuck about their suffering.

5. And when Trump said, "[L]et us resolve to find the best within ourselves. Let us pray for that extra measure of strength and that extra measure of devotion," was there no one in that room who could stand up and say, "Motherfucker, you have assaulted women and protected a known abuser. You destroy families, pollute the Earth, and fan the flames of hatred. God should slap the prayers right out of your orange fascist face"? No, there wasn't. There were only greedy sycophants, ready to cleanse Trump of his sins, even the ones he committed right in front of them.

2/07/2018

Whenever some dingleberry of seeming bias against President Donald Trump is sharted out by his state media on Fox "news," the president and his supporters will crow that he is "vindicated" of one thing or other, usually that his campaign conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. Someone on some goddamn website or Twitter account finds some utterly minor thing that, blown up with graphics and set to sinister music, can be made to seem like the Deep State run by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is just setting up poor, innocent, pure, God-chosen Donald Trump in order to frame him for some crime he wouldn't ever even contemplate committing.

They did it with the Uranium One bullshit, declaring that "the real Russia scandal." They did it with the Nunes memo, which just showed that the FBI follows leads. They accuse Republicans Robert Mueller and James Comey of bias, which seems to mean, "If you want to investigate whether Donald Trump and people around him might have committed crimes." And they're doing it with the text messages of a couple of FBI agents now, with the latest supposedly implicating President Obama (spoiler: it doesn't and you're stupid if you think it does).

But here's the deal: Not one of these things clears Trump or his awful family or his merry band of plague rats and rabid dogs that we are forced to call "the White House."

Let's lay it all out as clearly as possible once again (because this is shit I've talked about before).

- Hillary Clinton could have totally given away 20% of the U.S. uranium deposits to the Russians in order to secure donations to her family's charity (honestly, just writing that seems so patently absurd, it hurts my brain a little). Sure, she would have had to have bribed or threatened the dozens of other people involved in any decision about uranium, but, shit, she's Hillary Clinton, allegedly the stone cold murderer of dozens of political enemies, so, sure, yeah, let's say this could totally happen.

- The FBI could have totally lied about the Democratic Party's involvement in the Steele dossier, as the Nunes memo asserts (even though, factually, the FBI didn't lie, but we're saying if horseshit were gold here), in order to continue surveillance of Carter Page, which they had started in 2013, but, obviously, they totally knew that he would be named by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers and just got a jump on it.

- James Comey could have totally been compromised into not charging Hillary Clinton with a crime on the emails, which somehow translates into something something no collusion Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch in the parlor with a candlestick. (I really don't understand the "fuck evidence and punch reality in the dick" mindset.)

- Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page could have been totally biased against Trump and their texts about what an asshole he is indicate that they had preconceived notions about whatever part of the investigation they worked on. And there could totally be a secret society of FBI agents meeting in some off-site coven to do some hoodoo to Trump. And today's big revelation, that Page had texted in September 2016, "potus wants to know everything we’re doing," could totally mean Obama wanted to interfere with the Hillary email investigation and not that he wanted to know if the United States was being cyber-attacked by Russia, which is definitely what it was, but, you know, Hillary using a private email server is worse than Watergate times Teapot Dome times Iran-Contra, motherfuckers.

Goddamn, you people are fucking nuts.

And, you know, the only way that any of these conspiracies make sense as being real is if there is a massive uber-conspiracy involving everyone from grunt-level agents to the former president of the United States to discredit Trump and his administration, and, even then, it would have had to start 5 years ago.

Of course, all Trump needs for all this to work is a few craven Republicans, like Devin Nunes and Ron "Secret Sauce" Johnson, to run interference, as well as media outlets permanently attached to his poisonous man-teats. The idiot hordes will gobble it up like Jesus jizz.

Yet, if every single one of those conspiracies were true, it still does nothing to prove that Trump isn't a money-launderer who is in the back pocket of Vladimir Putin and other rich fuck Russians, it does nothing to prove that Russia didn't use a bunch of different methods to tilt the election to Trump, and it also does nothing to change the outcome of the 2016 presidential race (the excuse that Trump and his spokeslackeys use as the reason why Democrats care about a foreign government fucking with our electoral process or that Trump may be compromised, not that they might actually give a shit that our sovereignty might have been breached).

If Donald Trump were innocent, you wouldn't need a single one of the crazy conspiracies to explain it all away. You'd have the truth. But truth is now just a ragged angel whose wings have been perforated by the birdshot of unending lies.